Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  “Luggage?” Anna said to get things moving.

  “Got it.” He shook the strap of an oversized leather shoulder bag he carried.

  “You must be planning on wrapping this one up in record time.”

  “I heard you were on the case so I only brought one change of underdrawers.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that so Anna merely nodded.

  With what seemed a maximum of fuss and fiddling around, she got the federal agent buckled into the passenger seat of the patrol car and started the trip back to the park.

  As they drove to the main highway, Stanton waved graciously at passing traffic. “Boy, I love riding in cars with lights and sirens,” he said. “Everybody waves back. They think they did something and you’re not stopping them for it. Kind of makes you pals.”

  Anna laughed. “I wondered what it was.”

  Stanton made idle conversation, the kind she’d grown used to working with him on the island. During the weeks of that investigation she’d come to look upon it as his personal music, the kind designed to soothe the savage beasts; charming in its whimsy, disarmingly inane. When one became complacent, convinced he was a complete boob, he’d pounce.

  “Okay,” he said as she pulled out onto highway 160. “Tell me the good-parts version.”

  Anna switched off the radio and pulled her thoughts together. As succinctly as possible, she recounted the disappearance, the discovery of the body, the widow’s whereabouts the night of the murder, and Rose’s casting blame in the general direction of the pipeline contractor.

  Stanton sat for a while humming “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” under his breath. The patrol car crawled up the long slope out of Durango. Anna unfettered her mind and let it wander over the now-green ski slopes of Hesperus and the fresh new-leaved poplar trees skirting the mountain ravines. The sky was an impossible blue, a blue seen only on hot midwestern summer days and high in the mountains. Cornflower blue—the phrase flickered through her mind, though she’d never seen a cornflower.

  “That’s no fun,” Frederick said finally. He twisted around in his seat till the shoulder strap pushed his collar up under his right ear and his bony knees pointed in Anna’s direction. “Tell me the gossip, innuendo, lies, suppositions, weird happenstance. Dead guys are pretty dull without some good dirt. Do dish me.”

  “The dead guy was a friend of mine,” Anna replied irritably.

  “Oops.” Stanton looked genuinely contrite and she was sorry for such a cheap shot. She’d thought of Stacy as the dead guy not three hours earlier. She’s almost made up her mind to apologize when Stanton spoke again.

  “Callous, that’s me all over. How about this: Deceased individuals, however meritorious in life, lack the essential spontaneity to generate interest. So those left living must keep their spirits alive through the practice of the oral tradition.”

  Anna snorted. “Callous is right. The dirt.” Out of spite—or self-defense—she told Stanton everything she could think of that occurred in the park, or in anyone’s imagination in the park, around the time of the murder: Jamie’s chindi, the pipeline, medicals, evacuations, the superintendent’s secretary’s marital problems, the monkey-wrenching, the dorm, Piedmont’s foster home, Bella’s dwarfism. She got bored before he did, running out of words as they passed through the tiny town of Mancos.

  “And the meritorious deceased?” Stanton pushed.

  Anna was torn between a desire to snub the fed for his flippancy and a need to talk of Stacy. The need to talk won. She’d used that need a dozen times to pull information from people. Mildly, she cursed herself for giving in to it now. To retain some vestige of self-respect, she culled all emotion from her tone. Dispassionately, she recounted Stacy’s sensitivity, love of the parks, his attachment to Bella and addiction to Rose.

  At the word “addiction,” Anna realized she was being catty. Hoping it had slipped by Stanton, she made a mental note to talk to Molly about it.

  “Rats,” he summed up when she’d done. “Sounds messy and domestic. Widows and orphans and who’s divorced and who’s dead. Any drug dealings, you think?”

  He sounded so hopeful Anna laughed as she shook her head. “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  “Too bad.” Stanton screwed himself around in the seat, draping one long arm over the back and looking down into the valley as the car climbed the winding road cut in the side of the mesa. “Drug dealers make such satisfying bad guys. Not so good as Nazis or Hell’s Angels, but then who is? Hate doing the widows, especially when they’re all fresh and weepy.”

  HILLS Dutton was waiting for them in the CRO. In the past Anna had often found rangers loath to turn an investigation over to an outside agency. Some hated surrendering the power, others suffered a natural discomfort at letting anyone not a member of the family paw through the dirty laundry. Lord knew what they might choose to air.

  Dutton was the exception; he couldn’t wait to dump this one in somebody else’s lap. Statements, paperwork, the photographs, and the autopsy—unopened and dated two days previously, Anna noted—had been stuffed into a manila envelope. Hills thrust it into Stanton’s hands the instant the introductions were over. Lest the abdication appear incomplete, he added: “This is our busy season and I’ve got a park to run so I’m giving you Anna for whatever while you’re here.”

  “My very own ranger,” Stanton gloated as he and Anna walked back to her patrol car. “Just what I always wanted... well, next to a pony.”

  Anna grumbled because it was expected of her but she was pleased with the assignment. Parking tickets and medical evacuations had begun to pall, replaced by an undoubtedly unhealthy obsession with Stacy Meyers, living and now dead.

  She took Stanton, the envelope still clamped under his arm, to Cliff Palace and played tour guide as she led him down the steep path into the alcove where the village was built. During the descent a metamorphosis took place. By the time they stood before the ruin, Stanton had lost his puppyish ways. Even his physical appearance was altered. The angles of his bones had sharpened, his stride was no longer gangling but purposeful, and his step had softened till the leather soles fell with scarcely a sound. Anna was put in mind of the time they had sat on a rock overlooking Lake Richie on Isle Royale waiting for a murder suspect; the sense she’d gotten then of the wolf shedding its sheep’s clothing.

  The ruin was packed with tourists moving through the ancient pueblo in a sluggish stream. At the base of the tower where Anna and Stacy had found the asthmatic child, people were backed up twenty deep waiting to stick their heads through the window to see the paintings.

  “Like the Matterhorn at Disneyland,” a voice from above and behind Anna sneered.

  Jamie Burke was seated high on a boulder in the shade. A silver counter rested in her right hand and she clicked off tourists as they came by. The usual questions: when? who? how? and where did they go? were all answered in the same way: “It’s in the brochure.”

  Anna was not impressed. Unlike the wilderness parks, which she staunchly believed were for animals and plants dwelling therein, Mesa Verde was for the visitors. Humans paying tribute with curiosity and awe to human ancestry. On Isle Royale and in Guadalupe, law enforcement was there to protect and preserve. The main function of rangers on the mesa was to keep the flow of traffic orderly so the interpreters could bring this history to life.

  “Hi, Jamie,” Anna said neutrally.

  Ignoring her, Jamie slid down from the rock to land on legs strong as shock absorbers. “Are you the FBI guy?” she demanded of Stanton.

  The agent stuck out his hand. The unhinged, bumbling look had returned, donned like a disguise. “Yes indeedy.”

  Jamie didn’t shake his hand. Putting fists on hips, she squinted up at the walls filling niches high above the dwelling. “You’re too late. Too bad Stacy had to die. He was my closest friend,” Jamie said. “Maybe he’d still be alive if you’d listened to me.”

  “You” was generic, as in “they,” and Anna didn’t bother
to challenge it.

  “How so?” Stanton asked politely.

  “Al said this strip-mining was killing the sacred land. They’ve got to be given their home, their peace. Are you going up into the ruin?” she asked suddenly.

  “That’s what us FBI guys do.”

  “It’s a sacred place. Fragile. People aren’t allowed to go stomping around up there and for good reason.”

  Annoyance was nibbling away at Anna’s already strained patience. She drew breath to speak. Stanton heard and shot her a look that shut her up.

  “What’s the good reason?” he asked.

  “Death.”

  He didn’t react to the melodrama. “Wow,” he said with seeming sincerity. “Whose?”

  “Stacy was not the first. You want him to be the last, then stop intruding.”

  Stanton was mystified. Jamie was enjoying her part in this homemade theatrical and would play it out as long as she could.

  Anna jumped in with the punch line. “Old Ones, Anasazi, chindi, ghosts, spirits,” she told Stanton. “Jamie believes—”

  “Along with a lot of other people,” the interpreter stuck in.

  “—that the ghosts or spirits of the original inhabitants of the mesa are popping up out of the underworld now and then, showing their displeasure at the modern tourism industry by striking down a select handful of the hundreds of thousands of people who pass through here every year.”

  “Not exactly!” Jamie snapped.

  “Girls, girls,” Frederick chided, and Anna quelled an impulse to bite him.

  “We’d best get moving,” she said, glancing at her watch as if time was of the essence.

  Jamie puffed out an exaggerated sigh. “I’d better go with you. That’s an easily impacted area.”

  “Stay,” Anna ordered.

  Jamie bristled but stayed. Anna didn’t add “Sit!” but she thought about it.

  “Will you be here for a while?” Stanton asked the interpreter. “I’d like to talk with somebody who really has a feel for this place.”

  Jamie’s bristles lay back down. She tossed her braid over her shoulder and almost smiled. “I’ll be here.”

  “More flies with honey, Anna. Got to get them flies,” Stanton said as they walked down the path.

  The kiva had not been disturbed since the body was carried out. Yellow tape marked POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS and held down with stones was placed an “X” over the top of the kiva. Once Stanton had examined the scene the tape would be removed and the floor raked smooth.

  The FBI agent sat down on the edge where the roof had once been and dangled his legs over the side. “Other folks find bodies in dumpsters, storm drains, vacant lots. Yours turn up in bizarre places. Your karma must be very strange,” he said to Anna.

  “Out in the sticks you’ve got to take what you can get.” She sat down next to him.

  He took the envelope he’d been carrying under his arm for the last forty minutes and pulled out the photographs of the crime scene. Pictures of the body had been blown up into 8x10 color prints.

  Looking at the photos, Anna knew memories of Stacy in life would be hard to come by. This was how she would remember him: a banquet for flies. She’d never viewed Zach’s body really, just the barest of glimpses to ID it. Studying pictures of Stacy, the value of open-casket funerals, the laying out of the body, night watches—rituals that cut across religious and cultural lines—became clear. To let the living see the dead were most certainly dead and so to let them go. Ghosts were not the spirits of the dead returning but the memories of the living not yet laid to rest.

  “The man is dead.” Frederick startled her with an echo of her thoughts. “He’s curled himself up—”

  “Or been curled up by somebody.”

  “In a what... a fire pit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gun on, radio on, no marks of violence, no tracks but his, the ground all raked neatly and his little hat tidy on that wall thing.”

  “And his shoes off. See.” Anna pointed to the cordovan shoes tucked up near the brown-stockinged feet.

  “You know what I like? I like big old bullet holes and somebody standing a few feet away with a smoking gun screaming, ‘My God, I killed him! I killed him!’ ”

  “That happen often?”

  “All the time. How do you think we catch as many as we do?”

  Anna stared down at the trampled kiva floor. “At least this gives us job security.”

  Stanton laughed and she realized how rare that occurrence was. Too bad, it was a good wholesome sound.

  He put the photographs back and took out the autopsy report. “The envelope, please,” he said as he ripped it open. “And the winners are . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked over the three single-spaced typed pages.

  Anna couldn’t read the small type without all but sitting in his lap so she possessed her soul in patience, passing the time by imagining how the village would have looked with cook fires burning, people hauling water, weaving cloth, children playing on the kiva roofs.

  “Time of death.”

  Her attention snapped back to the twentieth century.

  “Somewhere between eight P.M. and three A.M. Monday night, the twenty-first of June. Had rice and chicken for dinner and red licorice for dessert. Cause of death, heart failure.”

  “Can’t be!”

  “Right there.” Stanton pointed a big-knuckled finger at the bottom of the second page.

  Anna took the report and read the offending sentence. “Natural causes?” she ventured, then read on. “Doesn’t say.”

  “Could be a lot of things. Did he have a history of heart disease?”

  “His wife said he was in perfect health. Perfect. And that’s a quote.”

  Stanton pondered the underground room. “Shock, fear, drug overdose, respiratory failure, what causes the heart muscle to stop?”

  “Electrical current, lightning, blunt trauma.” Anna couldn’t think of anything else.

  “I opt for one of those,” Stanton said. “Even if he had a bad heart, I can’t see a guy with chest pain, nausea, having trouble breathing, climbing up, crawling down, kicking his shoes off and the bucket.”

  “Callous.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “Read me that third paragraph on page two—after all the chemical breakdown gobbledygook,” Stanton said.

  “There was no sign of drug or alcohol in the blood or muscle tissue.”

  “There goes drug overdose,” Stanton said sadly.

  “No bruising of the soft tissue.”

  “There goes blunt trauma.”

  “No sign of ingested poison. No entrance or exit wounds. No occluded arteries or symptoms of arteriosclerosis.”

  “Damn. So much for natural causes. That pretty much leaves us with your Miss Burke’s spirits. Fear and shock. Guy lays down for a nap in the fireplace, up pops a sipapu and wham! scares him to death. Case closed.”

  “A sipapu’s a place, not a thing.” Anna pointed to the crockery-lined hole. “Your bogeyman had to come out of there. Pretty tight squeeze for a truly terrifying critter.”

  “Bad things come in small packages.”

  Anna went back to the autopsy report. “ ‘Oval burn marks approximately one inch by an inch and a half, first degree, on the right arm between the elbow and the shoulder. Similar mark on the left upper arm two inches above the antecubital space.’

  “I saw that. That mark. I thought it was a bruise. I get bruises there sometimes from the butt of my gun banging my arm.”

  Stanton pulled a pair of half glasses out of the breast pocket of his madras shirt and shoved them up onto his nose. They were the kind with heavy black frames sold by drugstores. A children’s show host Anna had watched as a child wore those same glasses. Uncle Happy, she remembered.

  The agent held the photo they’d been discussing under his chin and stared down at it through the magnifying lenses. “Oval burn marks. That smells clue-y to me. What d
id they look like?”

  Anna took her eyes from the picture, rested them on the stone of the kiva floor, and let Stacy’s corpse materialize. “I didn’t inspect them closely at the time. Like I said, maybe bruises from the gun or being grabbed too hard. Thinking back, they were brownish—no purples, greens, blues, or yellows you might find with a healing bruise. And scaly. I touched one and it felt the way sunburned skin does when it’s just beginning to peel.”

  Stanton whistled “An Actor’s Life for Me,” from Pinocchio . Lost in thought, he waggled his feet over the open air. “Leaning against something hot,” he suggested. “Like a motorcycle manifold.”

  “Both arms and both on the inside? Odd.”

  “True. He’d have to be hugging the Harley. Pretty silly he’d look too, if you ask me. Sorry,” he apologized automatically.

  They thought awhile longer. “Something dripped?” Anna ventured. “Hot wax. He was reaching up to take a candle off the mantel or something.”

  “Could be. Kinky sex stuff? I’ve seen wax used in S and M movies—strictly Bureau research, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Stacy didn’t seem the type.”

  “Still waters?”

  “Maybe.” But Anna didn’t think so.

  They fell into silence again. The steady hum of the tourists below provided white noise, the occasional call of a canyon bird a pleasing counterpoint.

  Grating sounds cut through and Anna pulled her thoughts up out of Stacy’s grave. Jamie Burke marched toward them along the wall that accessed the kiva where they sat, her heavy tread designed more to garner attention than to protect an “easily impacted area.” Claude Beavens was behind her. There was no tow rope visible but he moved with the reluctant hitching motion of a vehicle not under its own power.

  “That’s him.” Jamie pointed an accusatory finger at Frederick Stanton. “The FBI guy.”

  Stanton scrambled to his feet and stuck out his hand. “How do you do?” he asked formally.

  Beavens looked around for someplace else to be. Not finding one, he took the proffered hand and mumbled, “Pleased to meet you,” the way children are taught to in grade school.